Associate Professor S. (Raghu) Raghavan (BMGT/ISR) is one of the editors of a new book published by Springer, The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges. The other editors are Bruce Golden, the France-Merrick Chair in Management Science in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland; and Edward Wasil, professor in the Kogod School of Business at American University in Washington, D.C.

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) has been an especially active and fertile area of research. Over the past five to seven years, there have been numerous technological advances and exciting challenges that are of considerable interest to students, teachers, and researchers. The new book focuses on a host of significant technical advances that have evolved during this period for modeling and solving vehicle routing problems and variants. New approaches for solving VRPs have been developed from important methodological advances. These developments have resulted in faster solution algorithms, more accurate techniques, and an improvement in the ability to solve large-scale, complex problems.

The book systematically examines these recent developments and also looks at novel problems that have arisen in the vehicle routing domain and highlight new challenges for the field and significant methodological advances. The most significant research results for the vehicle routing problem and its variants from 2000 to the present are included.